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Why Republicans Should Embrace The Reality Of Climate Change

We have reached the point where every rational person who believes in making decisions based on science and available data should, if not fully believe that human beings are warming the planet by releasing greenhouse gases, at least recognize that this is what the data seem to suggest and that it is what the vast majority of scientists who study weather believe is the case.

Recognizing this does not force anyone to oppose pipelines, support a carbon tax, or start composting and wearing hemp shoes. It just opens us up to start aiming our fiery furnace of a political system at actually solving our problems. Go ahead, argue that the economic cost of anti-greenhouse measures doesn’t justify the benefit, especially if the planet is getting too hot. Argue that we should look for technical solutions not only to reduce carbon dioxide and methane emissions but not to suck the stuff out of the atmosphere – although then you might find yourself standing with Bill Gates and calling for more investment in R&D. If you want to wade into the science, argue that the worst-case scenarios are overstatements.

Below follow some of the main objections that have come up over the past year or so when I discussed this issue with conservative friends who do not believe in global warming – and the reasons why I think those objections have been covered.

But warming stopped.

No it didn’t. The global temperature is rising, but it also bounces around a lot. Between 1998 and 2005, average global temperature did not increase. But that’s because 1998 was really hot. An abnormally strong El Nino caused heat to move from the ocean into the atmosphere. Besides being cherry-picking, this also ignores warming in the ocean, scientists say.

The Earth is getting warmer, but it’s too much of a leap to say that human beings are the reason. There are plenty of natural climate cycles and I believe in being skeptical.

Fair enough. But this is science, and skepticism has to come within the framework of what we already understand. The scientific method does not simply mean coming up with an idea, or hypothesis, and testing it to see if it is true.

Hypotheses are supposed to be based on our existing body of understanding – based on our current theory. These get tested before wilder and crazier ideas. We don’t just leap to testing whether aliens are using the planet as a dump for the heat from their warp drives.

It’s certainly true that climate can change dramatically over time, and has. There have been ice ages and hot periods. But right now, there are not obvious candidates for other explanations of current warming. For instance, the sun seems to be cooling.

“There’s no way of explaining what’s happened in the last 50 years through natural cycles,” says Donald Wuebbles, the Harry E. Preble Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Illinois.“We have no evidence of a natural cycle that can do anything like this. It also exactly fits with all our knowledge of what happens with carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases. We’ve known about greenhouse gases since 1824! We know the oceans are warming, the atmosphere’s warming, the land is warming. It’s all happening in tune with each other.”

Wuebbles says “there’s no basis for trying to make up something because you’d like that to be true” and that “you can’t dream up natural cycles as if that will work.”

A natural cycle still seems more likely than the idea that we’ve made the atmosphere into a giant heat tent.

The main reason for believing that the atmosphere is a giant heat tent is that this has been the basis of climate science for nearly 200 years. Joseph Fournier, the great mathematician, first made calculations about how the atmosphere keeps the Earth warm in 1824. John Tyndall, a physicist, established that particular gasses, including water vapor but also methane and carbon dioxide, resulted in heat being trapped in the atmosphere. The Swedish scientist, Svante Arrhenius, showed in 1896 that more carbon dioxide would mean warming and predicted that industrial output could eventually warm the planet. The greenhouse effect is the main explanation for why Venus is super-hot – the hottest planet in the solar system – and Mars is super-cold. So this isn’t an out-there idea. It’s an outgrowth of our basic theory, our understanding, of how the warming of planets works, and it has been tested again and again. These are not new ideas, and they are not based entirely on computer models.

Scientists are just trying to get government money.

Dangling grant money is a great way to shift the priorities and perspectives of scientists, but it doesn’t tend to lead them to make things up. Most of the scientists who are arguing for global warming could probably make more money if they went to work for industry. Also, controversial ideas get published all the time, and there would be a Nobel Prize in proving that warming isn’t happening.

Everything Al Gore says is wrong.

In our interview and during a press conference at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston this weekend, Wuebbles actually agreed that misstatements by Gore had led to a backlash.

“Most of what is pretty good but there’s a few comments that are over-exaggerations,” says Wuebbles. “That’s typical Al. I’ve known him for years. He gets it, he understands it, but he has the ability to overstate it and some of those overstatements are where he gets in trouble.”

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Bob, what warmed the oceans? The sun has been in a downward decline for 50+ years: Leif Svaalgard at WWT has schooled you on this point for a year, yet you offer no other mechanism for the warming of the oceans. your “paper” (a non-peer reviewed PDF, for those who do not know) is essentially a tautology.

Where is the heat coming from? there’s only one real source and–hint hint–it’s NOT internal heat content of the planet.

You can’t have a little cataclysmic climate change and if it’s not a crisis, climate change crisis is not real! Science has never said any climate crisis (death for all) “will” be a crisis, only could be and not one single IPCC warning says it will happen, only might happen. So it’s only you lazy copy and paste news editors and goose-stepping journalists and fear mongers and pandering politicians that are saying it “WILL” happen. 27 years of science only saying it might happen not will happen proves beyond any doubt that a crisis won’t happen. Former Climate Change Believers Are Better Planet Lovers!

The Republican Party principal aim is to win elections to advance its political objectives. Denying the reality of climate change wins votes from the Republican base and gains no votes from other sectors. Acknowledging climate change will lose the Republican Party votes from its own base but will gain it now votes from other sectors. The electoral math is simple, they lose votes by acknowledging climate change and hold steady by denying it.

2. Science & Ideology

You entirely correct that the science is very clear and thank you for being the first blogger on Forbes.com publish an acknowledgement of the deep history of climate change science. However conservatives, as those commenting on your blog make clear, are not interested in science. They have staked out an ideological territory of climate change denial and mere facts will not alter the boundaries of that territory. They are of course reduced to the saddest of defenses, agnosticism – “Can we really know anything at all, much less take action on our poor epistemology”. It would not help the conservative cause to surrender this territory, they would only lose and gain nothing.

3. Conclusion

It is a lose-lose proposition for the Republican Party and the conservative movement to acknowledge the reality of climate change. They will of course some day but only when it no longer matters. =============================================

BTW, in addition to the work of Fourrier, Tyndall, and Arrhenius in the history of climatology you might think about acknowledging Mikhail Ivanovich Budyko.

n the 1950′s leaders of the scientific community in the USSR came up with the idea of intentionally causing global warming. A huge part of the country was frozen a large portion of the year. Clever people in power thought that by spreading carbon dust over the glaciers and permafrost, more heat would be absorbed and they could make Siberia more hospitable and arable. It fell to Mikhail Ivanovich Budyko to oppose this idea. He started doing the appropriate calculations to show that, yes, Siberia would become warmer but the ocean levels would rise and weather conditions would become more extreme. He argued, on the whole, it was a bad idea. As an out growth of this work, he became one of the founders of physical climatology. Prior to this time, to the extent climatology was a science at all, it was largely qualitative (Pr. Arrhenius’ theory being an exception but in the early 1950′s his work in this field was largely forgotten). Budyko was a pioneer in developing a world heat budget. He calculated what the temperature of the Earth would be using a simple physical model of equilibrium in which the incoming solar radiation absorbed by the Earth’s system is balanced by the energy re-radiated to space as thermal energy. His masterful contribution to climatology was “Heat Balance of the Earth’s Surface” (1956) transformed climatology into a quantitative science. Despite his work occurring at the height of the cold war, his methods were quickly adopted by climatologists around the world. Later, he published an atlas of the Earth’s heat budget (1963). There is a very good book “Anthropogenic Climatic Change” by Dr. Budyko (with Dr. Izrael) September 1990, University of Arizona Press.

The real issue here isn’t climate-change denialism among conservatives. If if that’s all it were, then you could bring out some charts, have a reasoned argument and persuade them to acknowledge scientific reality. But this isn’t about that.

Sometime in the past, probably around the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan reshaped modern conservativism, it was required that conservatives adopt and espouse certain core principles. Chief among these ideas is that concern about the environment is a bad thing – it’s a dirty liberal hippie thing.

In this view, any discussion of the environment is bad, and it’s only of interest to alfalfa sprout granola Greenpeace weenies. Real men, real republicans, real conservatives drive big, gas-guzzling SUVs and the only thing you give the environment is your middle finger. The environment is a resource to be exploited and monetized. Any other kind of talk is hippie, communist stuff.

The science shows that the only forcing on climate of consequence over the last 50 years is the human drivers. The solar irradiance has decreased very slightly over that time so the Sun is not a contributor to the large temperature change we have seen. Large volcanic eruptions (e.g., Pinatubo) can cause a cooling effect for a few years after an eruption. Natural variability in the Earth system does contribute to the year-to-year changes. As we stated in the IPCC assessment, the change sin climate are unequivocal, and the changes are very likely (greater than 90% probability) due to human activities. Scientists tend to be conservative, so this is a very strong statement for us to make. The data is very clear as to what is happening and why it is happening.

Thanks for clarifying Dr. Wuebbles. Semantics and statistics often don’t play well together, but you made the case as plainly as scientific integrity allows. It’s very frustrating to have one of the greatest strengths of science, its use of statistics and probability in making statements about cause-effect relationships and predictions, used as a weapon, as in mememine’s comment about “may be”. If swallowing a gram of potassium cyanide will only “may be” lethal, then I should feel OK putting it on my Cheerios because I like the taste, right?

Why is the University of Colorado Climate Center TSI reconstruction showing that TSI has been increasing since 1900 and especially after 1975? Are you suggesting that the 1 watt/m^2 increase in heat output by the Sun had no influence in build up of ocean heat content since 1900? Are you suggesting latent heat that has accumulated in the oceans with increased solar TSI can’t take decades to emerge? Why are you so certain that TSI had no contribution to recent warming?

Why does your peer Dr. Michael Schlesinger’s latest paper on climate sensitivity of 1.9 degreeC disagree with the IPCC 3.0 degreesC if all the IPCC model assumptions for CO2 were correct? Again why are you so certain the IPCC is accurate?